Ringfort, Lodge, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ringforts
On a low ridge in the rolling grassland near Lodge in County Galway, there is nothing to see.
That absence is precisely the point. A ringfort once occupied this spot, a roughly circular enclosure of the kind that was once so common across early medieval Ireland that the landscape held tens of thousands of them. This one was apparently removed by the landowner sometime in the 1950s, leaving no surface trace behind.
The site appears on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1920, marked as a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter and possibly bivallate, meaning it may have had two concentric banks or ditches rather than one. Ringforts of this type typically served as enclosed farmsteads in early medieval Ireland, their earthen banks providing a degree of protection for a family's home and livestock. A bivallate example would have represented a more substantial effort of construction, and possibly a household of some local standing. Associated with the site is a tradition of a clochán, a type of small dry-stone building, within the interior, though again nothing remains visible. What the 1920 map recorded as a monument had already been erased before anyone had the chance to investigate it formally.